A 'feel-good' week for a 'feel-bad' field
This has been a rare, inspiring week for the profession in a month that has highlighted the conditions that we who are in it work under.
One sour note is the Presidential Task Force on Media Security playing down journalist killings.
“[D]on’t believe in the propaganda that journalists are really being directly targeted here for being journalists,” task force head Joel Sy Egco says of the murder of Jesus “Jess” Malabanan in Samar this week as if all this is a matter of categorization and definition.
The government is looking into a “non-work related” angle into the killing but colleagues in the Visayas point out that “even then, this will remain a casualty from our end.”
Finding out motive is important, of course, but focusing on whether a death was work-related or, as has happened, whether a victim was really a journalist, distracts from the fact that one of us was killed and that impunity in these attacks raises the risk of more attacks and of journalists censoring themselves out of fear.
Saying Malabanan only wrote “feel-good” stories of late also plays down the risks that journalists take when reporting on stories that aren’t “feel good” like those on the “war on drugs” as his colleagues from Reuters and the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines attest he did.
When journalists raise a howl when one of us is killed or attacked, it is not to make the government look bad or to embarrass the president, it is a recognition of our shared vulnerability.
It is a vulnerability made worse by factors that government agencies can address but it is also a vulnerability that cannot be wished away through a government agency’s definitions and categories.
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Taking inspiration and courage from colleagues braver and better than me as this terrible year comes to a close:
“Journalism is a tradition, and the line that Rappler holds is one that was drawn decades ago by men and women who stood at the barricades and said this far, no further. When brutalities are commonplace, the job of everyday journalism is resistance,” says Patricia Evangelista — an idol and inspiration from since I was a young reporter — as Maria Ressa is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“You have to know what values you are fighting for, and you have to draw the lines early – but if you haven’t done so, do it now: where this side you’re good, and this side, you’re evil. Some governments may be lost causes, and if you’re working in tech, I’m talking to you,” Ressa herself says in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture.
“Yes, we growl and bite. Yes, we have sharp teeth and strong grip. But we are the prerequisite for progress. We are the antidote against tyranny,” Novaya Gazeta’s Dmitry Muratov — also an awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize — says in his own lecture (the English transcript of which is available and puts the dog imagery in better context)
Ben Kritz writes in the Manila Times about how commercial media is caught up in misinformation and how that fight “will always be an uphill battle, and an ultimately unwinnable one; the best we can hope for is to avoid losing by keeping the battle going.”
BONUS: Adam, Johnson illustrates the danger and absurdity of false equivalence:
Needless to say, one cannot harbor “prejudice” against “business people” since “business people” aren’t born business people, nor is there any coherent tradition of oppressing or discriminating against “business people” as some type of vulnerable class.